I have been googling how micro plastics get into our bodies and I get a lot of articles saying it’s from drinking and eating from plastic but nothing explains HOW the micro plastics are actually leaving the containers and getting into us. I specifically want to understand how drinking out of a plastic bottle transfers plastic to our body? I understand microwaving plastic leaches chemicals into food but I don’t get how drinking cold water from plastic could transfer the micro plastic to our bodies.
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Micro-plastics can be released into the environment when we use and dispose of plastic products. They can also enter the food chain when animals mistake them for food and ingest them.
Also they can be inhaled when they are airborne through the use of plastics in manufacturing or through the breakdown of larger pieces of plastic waste.
Once airborne, micro-plastics can be transported long distances by wind and other atmospheric processes, potentially causing them to end up in remote areas where they can be inhaled by humans and other animals.
Plastic bottles and other objects break down into tiny particles over time like many other materials it just takes longer than things made out of paper. Additionally when bottles etc get squeezed or shaken it breaks off little bits due to friction I think. Imagine a car Tyre. You never see chunks flying off normally (except in crashes) but over the years the profile gets less and less thick (exception 2: you make burnouts. then you can actually see a cloud of those particles). And due to the amount of artificial materials like rubber, PP, PPE etc. in the world you have billions and trillions of microplastic particles flying around everywhere. They get inhaled by you or eaten off plants by small animals and insects until they reach your stomach through climbing the foodchain and end in cows, chicken etc. or even veggies.
Hope my English is understandable in some terms. 🙂
Drinking water from a plastic bottle does exposed you to microplastics. It’s not a huge amount, but is you for whatever reason only drink bottled water, plus combined with other sources u/daysofbreeze mentioned, it can be significant.
Ever wonder where the synthetic rubber from your tires go as they wear? that’s a microplastic. In this case it’s washed from our roads into the water and ecosystem. That water is used and consumed by people and voila.
basically things get worn down into smaller and smaller parts and we end up with small particles. Sometimes the items start out small like those microbeads in a lot of scrubbing body washes. They flow into the ecosystem and we eat or drink the items containing these micro plastics.
I’d say a lot from tap water. Sounds weird because it’s not bottled but you can look it up.
Everything breaks down.
Your body is like a cup in that when you breath in or consume something it enters you.
When tiny little bits of plastic break off a larger bit if plastic sometimes it floats in the air, floats in the water, is eaten or breathed in by other animals.
You either eat an animal with small bits of plastic in it, breathe it in, or drink water with bits of plastic.
Literally it’s no difference to anything else. You are constantly in taking little bits of shit you know nothing about and your body is either incorporating it in you or trying to Remove it.
Plastic is only different because it’s completely a man made molecule that your body dosnt know what to do with.
You coming at this problem from the wrong angle. You thinking about whole, large pieces of plastic instantaneously breaking down and entering your body e.g. drinking from a water bottle. While this can happen on a very microscopic scale, this isn’t the main problem. The issue comes from the fact that plastic does not degrade over human life times, it only breaks down into smaller and smaller particles. Once smaller enough microplastics can become airborne, you can breath them in, they can settle on food crops that we consume, they might even be in your drinking water.
Now scale this problem up into the marine food web. Small marine organisms (e.g. krill) might consume microplastics. These smaller organisms get eaten by bigger ones (fish). The fish end up having many times more microplastics in them because they consume a lot of krill. Then a larger fish will eat that fish ending up with even more microplastics in it’s system. This is called bioaccumulation and it’s a major factor in why humans should avoid eating too much large, fatty fish because they contain high amounts of mercury. It’s the exact same process but with plastics.
It’s not that we are directly consuming plastic, it’s the fact that what we eat and drink contains potentially thousands of small plastic particles that have built up over time in our food/water sources
Shelf > consumer > shady recycling company // or just littered > ocean > fish > shelf > consumer
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